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Academic
My research Archive
The articles in this section will lead you to my publications, as well as notes on the research process. Some articles are “academic” in nature, and the rest reflect on the joys and struggles of research. Hope you will enjoy them.
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Rights based approach & the Human development approach: Exploring linkages
Posted on June 1, 2008 | No CommentsThe rights based approach to development and the human development perspective have both become popular in the recent past. Despite a similar philosophical base, they were both developed in distinctly different communities and so they have different strengths and weaknesses in practice. One of the major strengths of the human development approach is that it has a lot of statistical techniques that have been developed by economists involved with the approach over many years. The rights approach always had a legal-political leaning and so it did not have the same kind of statistical tools for planning and for assessment. Rights... -
The importance of a pot belly
Posted on May 11, 2008 | 3 CommentsA Panchayat president I interviewed recently told me sweetly that people listen to her because she’s plump. Two years and twenty additional kilos earlier, I would have missed the import of the statement, but now I don’t. Let me give you a quick background before I start. I was very thin and was often called a skeleton, stick of a coconut leaf and other colourful adjectives. I left to the US in 2005 and after two years of Americanisation I got on the weighing machine. I pushed the scales to a familiar position and it remained upright. I nudged it... -
Food policy and social movements: Reflection on India’s Right to Food Campaign
Posted on December 1, 2007 | No CommentsThis paper was written for a book of case studies for a course on food policy in developing countries, and was meant for students interested in a career in food policy administration. Executive summary The Right to Food Campaign in India began in 2001. It was a time of absurd paradox. Even as the foodgrain stocks held by the government rose to 50 million metric tons, several parts of the country were reeling from a third consecutive year of drought. The threat of severe hunger loomed large, yet efforts to address this threat were insufficient. In April 2001 the People’s... -
On narrowing focus for dissertation proposal
Posted on April 30, 2007 | No CommentsOne of the biggest challenges in writing a proposal is to narrow down our interests to choose a topic In three days, I would have defended my dissertaion proposal, and it feels good to think that I’ll get it out of my way. It looks like the proposal is one of the biggest time killers among Ph.D. students; it is indeed a challenge to move from a variety of ideas to a defendable proposal. Most of us come to a Ph.D. with a broad set of interests and it feels awkward to narrow it down into a topic that almost... -
Papers and Reports I was involved in
Posted on February 21, 2007 | No CommentsThe right to food has been my main academic preoccupation so far. The following are some of my pieces (many co-authored) on various themes surrounding the issue. Citizens’ Initiative for the Rights of Children Under Six. 2006. Focus on children under six. Delhi: Circus. This report looks at the status of children under six, and the status of India’s only major child care system – Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). The report is based on a six-state survey and numerous other materials. The focus report is a joint work by a large team. My contribution was on the Tamil Nadu... -
School feeding as a global obligation
Posted on January 18, 2007 | No CommentsIt is now a well accepted rights have corresponding obligations. Such obligations are traditionally placed on national governments and other regional actors and never on international bodies. George Kent’s edited book Global obligation for the right to food explores the question of global obligations. In a chapter that I published in this book, I argue that if school feeding is desirable and suitable as a global obligation. Citation: S. Vivek, “School feeding as a global obligation,” in Global obligation for the right to food, ed. George Kent (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Click here to download.
